In the NY Post,Larry Brooks writes that people on both the players side and the owners side have said that even if the players agreed to the owners make whole proposal, they still wouldn’t have a deal unless the players also agreed to the owners contracting demands.

Elliotte Friedman writes at CBC that the owners say that the contract terms can be negotiated while the players say that is not the case.

Friedman thinks that the NHL will stand firm on their demand of no more than a 5% change in a players salary from year to year which would counter the front loaded contracts that players have been signing.

Yesterday the NHL and NHLPA met for an hour about contract issues.

Renaud Lavoie tweets that Bill Daly said “PA give us 17 issues on players contract last week. We have a deal, or made progress on 14 of them.”

Some of those issues, according to Lavoie, are: escrow, minimum salaries, playoff pool increases, elimination of re-entry waivers and changes to the waiver rules, no-trade clauses with contract extensions, an interview period for free agency where, like in the NBA, free agency would open and teams would have a chance to talk with players before they are technically allowed to sign them.

Lavoie does say though, “Still the major issues for PA on contracts are: Maximum 5 year contract. Arbitration and UFA push one year. That’s what the NHL want.”